The Will Smith I, Robot movie took its title from the classic Issac Asimov imagining of a future of robots that coexist productively with humans due to his Three Laws of Robotics. Asimov’s work is an optimistic statement on the power of science and reasoning to construct a utopian world. The Will Smith movie instead delivers a message of “Robots R Bad And Will Kill U All”, completely disregarding the whole point of the source material. They could have named it something else since it had almost nothing in common with the actual book, but instead they chose to take a giant dump on Asimov’s legacy.
You’re not wrong, by any means. But it was also a pretty fun popcorn flick.
Yes, they could have come up with a better title, but in the modern world, the number of people who know where the title came from is likely a lot less than it used to be as TikTok and YouTube slowly leach away brain cells from each new generation, so why would they bother?
Have you read the book? Most of the stories are related to humans getting into bad situations because they are relying on technology they don’t completely understand.
The original screenplay was an Agatha Christie inspired murder mystery, which then had Will Smith playing Will Smith forced in, with a known brand slapped on at the last second because the license was on hand.
It does spit in the face of Asimov’s work tho. It started off as an Agatha Christie inspired murder mystery called Hardwired.
The script went through the shredder several times, one round because the publisher happened to have the “I, Robot” rights on hand and wanted to slap it on. Hence “suggested by” instead of the usual “inspired” or “based on” and even that’s a stretch.
Then when Will Smith was cast he went through the script like a wrecking ball putting an action movie spin on what was originally supposed to be a pretty brainy story, involving only a single human character figuring out a crime by talking to a bunch of artificial ones.
Basically, it could have been more, but threw it all out to become schlock, and dunked on an established respected name while it was at it.
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